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Wednesday, September 30, 2015

So it appears the Bank of Japan (BoJ) had already doubled down on Abenomics before the prime minister announced a new NGDP level target. In late 2014, the BoJ said it would increase the growth of the monetary base and by implication the number of assets it would purchase.

The Bank will achieve the price stability target of 2 percent in terms of the year-on-year rate of change in the consumer price index (CPI) at the earliest possible time, with a time horizon of about two years.In order to do so, it will enter a new phase of monetary easing both in terms of quantity and quality. It will double the monetary base and the amounts outstanding of Japanese government bonds (JGBs) as well as exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in two years, and more than double the average remaining maturity of JGB purchases...The Bank of Japan will conduct money market operations so that the monetary base will increase at an annual pace of about 60-70 trillion yen.1

And here is footnote one:

Under this guideline, the monetary base -- whose amount outstanding was 138 trillion yen at end-2012 -- is expected to reach 200 trillion yen at end-2013 and 270 trillion yen at end-2014.

The BoJ got close. The monetary base hit 267.4 trillion yen at the end of 2014. The BoJ did not, however, hit its inflation target. So it announced in October, 2014 it would increase how fast the monetary base would grow:

[T]he Bank of Japan decided upon the following measures.

(1) Accelerating the pace of increase in the monetary base by a 5-4 majority vote. The Bank will conduct money market operations so that the monetary base will increase at an annual pace of about 80 trillion yen...

So the BoJ decided to double down its bets on Abenomics by growing the monetary base an additional ¥10 trillion a year for a total of ¥80 trillion per annum. This non-trivial pick up in growth can be seen in the figure below under the 'Abe II' label:

So maybe Japan is more determined than we realized to make this reflation experiment work. Maybe there is more credibility to Shinzo Abe's new NGDP level target than we first imagined. Abenomics has, after all, consistently raised aggregate demand as noted in my last post. The key is not to repeat the mistake made with Japan's first QE program by reversing the monetary base growth as is seen in the figure above.

P.S. Both the core inflation and rate deflator inflation rate show sustained rises. This is not good for Neo-Fisherism.

Monday, September 28, 2015

Formally re-elected head of the ruling party, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
said Thursday he has set out three new goals for “Abenomics” and will
target a 20 percent increase in gross domestic product to ¥600 trillion.

The details are murky, but what is clear is that for this plan is to work it will require a credible commitment to permanently expand the monetary base, as shown by Michael Woodford, Paul Krguman, William Buiter, and many others. But was not this already supposed to be happening? Was not Abenomics to permanently double the monetary base? Recall this figure of Japan's monetary base:

Some observers like Hausman and Weisman worry that Abenomic's monetary base expansion is not credible and therefore not permanent. If so, then this latest Abe goal of raising the level of NGDP by 20% may not be credible either.

Or maybe not. One way to check whether the monetary base expansion is expected to be at least somewhat permanent is to see whether nominal spending has been rising. If Abenomics is just a larger version of Japan's 2001-2006 QE program where the monetary base expansion was temporary and did little to raise aggregate demand, then we should expect to see similar patterns in nominal expenditures under Abenomics. So what has actually happened?

The figure above shows that Abenomics compared to the 2001-2006 QE
program has been fairly successful in generating aggregate
demand growth. This suggests that the monetary base growth is seen at least as somewhat
permanent.

Raising the level of NGDP from ¥499 to ¥600 trillion is a far bigger task. Below are three different growth paths for NGDP to reach its new target: a three-year path, a five-year path, and a seven year path. Although no official time table has been set for hitting the ¥600 trillion target, many observers are mentioning 2020 as the target date. As Simon James Cox notes, this time frame seems to be corroborated by Japan's Cabinet Office. This would correspond to the five-year path. If NGDP were to follow the trend growth of NGDP during Abenomics it would follow the seven-year path.

It is worth repeating, as I often do, that the more credible this policy becomes the less need there is for additional growth in the monetary base. If the public perceives the government is firmly committed to permanently expanding the monetary base then its velocity will grow as the public tries to rebalance their portfolios away from it. This increase in monetary base velocity, then, will do much of the heavy lifting in raising aggregate demand growth.

The question is whether a 20% increase in NGDP is a credible goal. It is one thing for Abenomics to gain some credibility, but a 20% NGDP increase in five years? I want to believe, but I am a bit skeptical.

Most of the NGDP growth completed under Abenomics has resulted in higher inflation rather than in higher real GDP growth. The figures below show the inflation rates for the GDP deflator and the core consumer prices in Japan. These increases in inflation have not been matched by sustained increases in real growth. Real GDP has average 0.58% year-on-year growth every quarter since 2013:Q1 whereas the deflator has average 0.93% growth.

What if the public expected these patterns to continue going forward? That is, what if most of the NGDP growth was expected to result in more inflation? In that case, I suspect the aging population in Japan living off fixed incomes would strongly object to the ¥600 trillion NGDP target. This IMF study lends support to this view. It shows It shows that economies with large numbers of old people tend to experience lower inflation rates. This suggests they have political influence.

One could argue that this higher level of inflation would reduce real debt burdens, ease excess money demand, lower real rates, and increase real economic activity in a way that has not been seen yet. This may be true, but that these developments have not happened speaks to why a 20% NGDP increase may not be credible. Abenomics may have been tolerated, but would an aging population and others holding government debt tolerate five more years of higher inflation? I am not so sure.

Another issue that complicates matters is that raising NGDP growth alone will not solve all Japan's problems. It has numerous structural problems that need to be addressed. These were supposed to be tackled in third arrow of Abenomics. Not much has happened here and maybe more robust NGDP growth would make it easier to address the structural problems.

I do not want to be too pessimistic here. Abenomics successfully raised NGDP growth compared to the 2001-2006 QE program. That is a real accomplishment and speaks to possibility of doing more. I just worry that a 20% NGDP target in five years might be asking too much given the amount of credibility it requires.

Update: One can view this NGDP credibility problem through the lenses of the fiscal theory of the price level. Below is an excerpt from an earlier post:

Paul Krugman [notes] that there could be too much
fiscal credibility. If so, it would be creating a drag on aggregate
demand growth (i.e. higher expected future surpluses imply lower
velocity today and, in turn, mean lower aggregate demand growth). While
this argument may apply to the United States, Krugman is certain it
applies to Japan. Here is Krugman discussing the proposed tax hikes in Japan:

I see no prospect that Japan will put off the tax hike forever. But even if it were true, this is credibility Japan wants to lose.

After all, suppose
investors conclude that Japan will never raise taxes enough to service
its debt. What would they think would happen instead? Not default —
Japan doesn’t have to default, because its debts are in its own
currency. No, what they might fear is monetization: Japan will print
lots of yen to cover deficits. And this will lead to inflation. So a
loss of fiscal credibility would lead to expectations of future
inflation, which is a problem for Abe’s efforts to, um, get people to
expect inflation rather than deflation, because … what?

Long ago I argued that
what Japan needed was a credible promise to be irresponsible. And
deficits that must be monetized are one way to make that happen...

Interestingly, John Cochrane the made the same point in his 2011 paper:

The last time these issues came up was Japanese monetary and fiscal
policy in the 1990s... Quantitative easing and huge fiscal deficits were
all tried, and did not lead to inflation or much‘‘stimulus’’. Why not? The answer must be that people were simply not convinced that the government would fail to pay off its debts.
Critics of the Japanese government essentially point out their
statements sounded pretty lukewarm about commitment to the inflationary
project, perhaps wisely. In the end their ‘‘quantitative easing’’ was
easily and quickly reversed, showing those expectations at least to have
been reasonable.

What Krugman and Cochrane are saying is that there may be too much fiscal credibility in Japan to allow the public to believe current and future monetary base expansions will be permanent. The interesting question, then, is whether the announcement of this NGDP target changes that credibility.

Update II: See John Cochrane's post on Japan. He briefly responds to this post in an update.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

The Cato Institute for Monetary and Financial Alternatives asked me to write a brief response to the last FOMC decision. It is now up at the Alt-M blog. Here is an excerpt:

Just a few months ago the FOMC was signaling it would almost certainly raise interest rates, but now it has changed its mind. This change would not be so bad if it were predictable, but it was not so. No one expects the Fed to perfectly forecast the economy, but we should expect the Fed to make clear how it would respond to differing states of the economy. This simply has not happened. From the QE programs to forward guidance to lifting interest rates from zero, Fed policy has been made up on the fly. This unpredictable behavior has meant that no one, including Fed officials, knows for sure what will happen from one FOMC meeting to the next.

As a result, markets have become more and more obsessed with every word coming from the mouths of Fed officials. Post-FOMC press conferences like the one last Thursday became must-watch TV for anyone concerned about investments. Ironically, then, the Fed’s attempt to calm markets through these ad-hoc measures has only made them more fragile.

I am as guilty as anyone about getting worked up about FOMC meetings. Nothing like the anticipation about what the Fed will do in the days leading up to the meeting. I am especially bad about looking forward to being on twitter during a post FOMC Janet Yellen press conference. It is sad that we have come to this state of affairs. Below is a repost of an earlier piece from 2014 that elaborates on this theme.

Friday, September 4, 2015

Over the past six years the Fed's preferred measure of the price level, the core PCE deflator, has averaged 1.5 percent growth. That is well below the Fed's explicit target of 2 percent inflation. Why this consistent shortfall?

Some Fed officials are asking themselves this very question. A recent Wall Street Journal article reporting from the Jackson Hole Fed meetings led with this opening sentence: "central bankers aren't sure they understand how inflation works anymore". The article goes on to highlight some deep soul searching being done by central bankers in the Wyoming mountains. It is good to see our monetary authorities engaged in deep introspection, but let me give them a suggestion. Dust off your revealed preference theory textbooks and see what they can tell you about the low inflation of the past six years.

To that end, and as a public service to you our beleaguered Fed officials, let me provide some material to consider. First consider your inflation forecasts that go into making the central tendency consensus forecasts at the FOMC meetings. The figures below show the evolution of these forecasts for the current year, one-year ahead, and two-years ahead. There is an interesting pattern that emerges from these figures as you expand the forecast horizon: 2 percent becomes a upper bound.

So the first insight from revealed preferences is that you and your fellow FOMC officials have been consistently looking at an upper bound of 2% on core PCE inflation. Now if we add to this observation the fact that the FOMC has meaningful influence on inflation several years out, then these revealed preference are saying you want and expect to get an inflation upper bound of 2%.

Your chair, Janet Yellen, conceded this point in the press conference following the December 2012 FOMC meeting:

But it’s important to point out that the Committee is not anticipating an overshoot of its 2 percent inflation objective (p.13).

Now an upper bound means there can be activity below it. And we see just that that in your inflation projections. Collectively, then, all of this revealed preference evidence suggests that you and your Fed colleagues do not have a 2% inflation target, but rather an inflation corridor target. Based on your above forecasts your corridor target appears to be somewhere between 1% and 2%.

We can get a better sense of where this inflation corridor target lies with additional revealed preference evidence. This evidence is found in the following figure which shows core PCE inflation and the timing of your QE programs. The figure suggest that you and your fellow FOMC members tend to start QE programs after core inflation had been drifting away from the 2% upper bound and you do so in a manner that prevents it from drifting below 1% for very long. (Based on this reading, you all are likely to change tack soon if core inflation does not stop drifting toward 1%. )

This reading is corroborated by looking at the changes in the Fed's share of treasury securities as a percent of all market treasuries. Ever since the zero lower bound kicked in late 2008, the FOMC has tended to allow its share of treasury holdings to adjust in manner that offsets changes in core PCE inflation. That is, when inflation was falling the Fed started increasing its share of treasury securities and vice versa.

So rest easy dear Fed official. No need for any existential angst. According to revealed preferences, you are still driving core inflation--which ignores supply shocks like changes in oil prices--it is just that you have a roughly 1%-2% core inflation target corridor rather than a 2% target. So even though you may not realize it, you are doing a bang up job keeping core inflation in your target corridor.